Durham Union Society

Founded in 1842, the Durham Union Society is the University's oldest and largest society, with over 2500 members in residence. It exists to stimulate debate and provide social facilities for its members.

The Union Society offers its members:

Friday night debates: The chance to hear, question and argue with prominent national figures.

Addresses from guest speakers and expert forums.

Use of the facilities at 24 North Bailey Club and use of Union Society facilities in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The opportunity to learn to speak with confidence in public through debating workshops and, if you wish, to debate competitively and represent the University across the UK and the world.

Some of the biggest and best university wide social events: including the Michaelmas Ball. Comedy Fest, Summer Garden Party, Annual Dinner, etc.

Explanation

"What's going on?" I hear you cry, "there is no formatting here!" Fear not, young padawan, the awesome powers of web Cascading Style Sheets are about to be demonstrated to you.

Let's assume you're using Netscape 7 (it being the default browser apud Dunelmi pro tem). Go to the view menu and select use style. A number of different style options will be presented. Try 'em, being sure to scroll up and down for all of them, then read on.

Current

This is, as the name suggests, a stab at replicating the current site layout. Why is this better than using Flash? Well, every browser can see the menu (though I haven't stuck many links into it so menu may be the wrong phrase) whereas not everyone has Flash (like f'rinstance, my little brother). It should load a hell of a lot quicker than a Flash menu as well. I've fixed the image in place, as I think the text running over the edge of it looks quite good.

Current, with expanding menu

This uses a funky little CSS trick to give expanding menus. I've also fixed the menu in place, while the body text scrolls.

Cathedral

An entirely different design which demonstrates an important point; using external stylesheets it is possible to completely change the look and feel of an entire site by changing one file. Which is nice. The image file sizes are too big really, but that's what you get with a rush job... The original painting featured on the back of termcards in the late 90s; 1996/7 IIRC.

Caveats

While non-CSS browsers will show the plain text version of the site, some of the techniques I've used may well break horribly in NS4 which has a horrendously buggy CSS implementation. IE6 fares better, though - I have yet to figure out why. It doesn't have the facility to pick alternate style sheets to the best of my knowledge, so to check I've had to change the code each time I tried a stylesheet. As the page stands ATM IE users should get the unformatted version of the page. It doesn't display the Cathedral setup properly either, though doesn't stop you from reading the gen. With more time I'd hack the CSS with the sundry workarounds that exist for these snags.